SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



ships, which brought both raw and woven silks from 

 China. 



This old, old question had been nagging Walter 

 Roberts for years. He was thoroughly fed up with the 

 prices and policies of the Japanese silk monopolists. So 

 he sent an expert to the Orient. Two years later he had 

 on his desk a regular tome of a report. The gist of 

 hundreds of typed pages was but a summary of the 

 old disappointment: silkworms can be successfully 

 grown in the United States, but silk cannot be profit- 

 ably produced here in competition with cheap Oriental 

 labor unless the delicate work of rewinding the cocoons 

 upon bobbins can be done by machine. So Walter 

 Roberts went out to find an Eli Whitney, some inventor 

 who could do for silk what the famous tinkering Yankee 

 had done for cotton. He found him in Gustav Beckman, 

 an engineer with the Universal Winding Company. 



These two unusual men have joined talents and re- 

 sources. Beckman, a reserved chap under fifty, has a 

 brain that is a direct, practical tool, like a scythe or a 

 tooth brush, which just cannot function in guesses or 

 promises. His cocoon- winding machine is now more 

 clever than the nimblest fingers since it can pick up 

 and reel on the bobbin several filaments at once, thus 

 eliminating the throwster operations in the silk mills. 

 Convinced by many trials that it works, Roberts agreed 

 to back it; made an exclusive contract with Universal 

 Winding to build the machines; and took over Beckman 



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